A House of Dynamite divides Netflix viewers after release

The new thriller film A House of Dynamite from Kathryn Bigelow has garnered different opinions from the audience in the first 24 hours of release on the streaming site Netflix.

The movie repeatedly pointed out the 18 minutes that track a nuclear missile being targeted at the United States (US) from three distinct perspectives: the preliminary from the White House Situation Room, followed by the US Strategic Command, and last from the President himself.

However, Bigelow, the director of the war films such as Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker, deliberately keeps the identity of the person responsible for the missile attack a mystery.

Kathryn Bigelow told Netflix’s Tudum that the antagonist system we’ve created to end the world is essentially on a hair trigger.

The movie concludes on an ambiguous note, with the president (Idris Elba) considering whether to let the missile strike Chicago to avert the war or to respond. The missile’s exact impact is never shown.

“I want audiences to leave theaters thinking, ‘OK, what do we do now?’” Bigelow further to Tudum. “This is a global issue, and of course I hope against hope that maybe we reduce the nuclear stockpile someday. But in the meantime, we really are living in a house of dynamite. I felt it was so important to get that information out there, so we could start a conversation. That’s the explosion we’re interested in — the conversation people have about the film afterward.”

Fans on the other side showed their disappointment, discussing that the movie’s ending left them feeling down online.

A netizen, while describing the repeated scene wrote on X, “Nobody wants to hear the same story 3 times and have it end without an end.“The Director literally antagonises viewers 3 times and then walks out the door.”, he added

“I was glued to the TV, then with that ending I was praying the Nuke hit me,” another added. “Has to be in the conversation for worst movie ending of all time.”

The movie’s last scenes additionally sparked debate on the famous social site subreddit, r/movies.

“I get why they decided on that ending. I really do. But as I finished that movie, all I could think is ‘People are going to f***ing hate this ending,’” A user wrote. “Thought the first part was great, then it just started getting repetitive and dragging on,” one more user penned his thoughts. continuing, “I don’t mind cliffhanger endings, but this didn’t even feel like that. Just feels like an unfinished movie.”

A House of Dynamite has a critics’ score of 79 per cent on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing despite the complaints.

Moreover, Geoffrey Macnab called it the most entertaining film regarding the mass devastation since Dr Strangelove in a four-star review for The Independent.